


Many Gods Into One

by matrixrefugee



Category: American Gods - Neil Gaiman
Genre: Gen, Historical Fantasy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-25
Updated: 2019-02-25
Packaged: 2019-11-05 14:44:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 459
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17920829
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/matrixrefugee/pseuds/matrixrefugee
Summary: Ibis handles the tale of Akhnaten as carefully as he can.





	Many Gods Into One

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [American Gods, any, Sometimes, the teacher dramatically wrote about a royal printer.](http://fic-promptly.dreamwidth.org/106480.html?thread=4974576&format=light#cmt4974576)

There were tales which Ibis hesitated to write. Akhenaten's tale was one of them.

The young man had meant well, but as with so many other good intentions, it lead the one who possessed them down a path which they did not expect, particularly since the one who formed them was an inexperienced young man. Condensing the pantheon of the land of the Nile was one of those ideas which worked in the mind of the strange young man who had become king, and it worked on the paper on which he had ordered his scribes to write them down. His notions seemed to have been seeded by the faith of the Habiru living in the land of Gessen, and at first, it seemed to be the mere whim of a young man who had become enamored of some novelty of an idea, but as he persisted in it, the notion took a solid form, even taking on a name of its own, namely a single god whom he called Aten. The priests of Amun had grown too powerful; they humored their ruler's ideas for a time, letting him build a temple to Aten (though Amun knew who the young man really was thinking of, though he chose to call him by another name). It would not be long, they thought (or hoped), when their king realized his ideas divided rather than united Kemet. It was foolish of him to try and borrow notions from the people of Gessen. One god? Absurd. The world was too intricate for one god to manage everything. There had to be a division of labor, just as the tasks around the palace were divided among many servants or the matters of state were divided among many ministers.

It came as no surprise that the reign of the prince of Aten came to an abrupt end and that the worship of Aten would end with the king's life. Ibis couldn't help writing about these events without his pen working so fiercely that the nib of his pen nearly scored through the paper. A man might be killed and the ideas he nurtured, however strange or outlandish, might fade with him, but you couldn't really kill an idea or its champion. Aten had not been a bad young man, any more than the young prince who had called him into existence. But as with other gods before him and ones who would follow, he too would fade into the west, escorted by Ibis himself.

But some spark of him lived on: Aten's chief devotee had written an invocation, a prayer which the people of Gessen took with them when they returned to their own homeland, adding it to the prayers to their own one God.


End file.
